I'll start with the San Antonio Spurs beating the Oklahoma City Thunder last night, a tense finish, because the game at the end was much closer than the score of 111-103.  Want to see emotions?   Watch how Victor Wembanyama reacted .  The Spurs now play the New York Knicks beginning Wednesday.  First team to win four games becomes the NBA champion. That was only a game.  In Laos, five gold miners were rescued yesterday .  However, two remain missing. Moving on to my topic of the day, we had dinner with another couple in the dining room of 15 Craigside last night.  As this was our first meal together, we shared what we all did to get us here.  That made me further reflect on my life, especially, what turned out to be three 27-year periods leading to what I am today. I was born in 1940 at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu.  That's a more modern sign to the right.  The first five years of my life were okay, but I don't remember much. My mot...

Sundays are sometimes spiritual and occasionally reflective.  So today I'll look at my 84 years of life in that manner because it took 42 years of development to allow for the latter 42 years of progress. To begin; I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and was a little more than a year old when my mother held me in her arms and pointed to the smoke emanating from Pearl Harbor on 7December1941.  Of course I don't remember any of that, and not much about World War II either. Growing up in the "fishing village" of Kakaako, which is now at the edge of the expanding Ward complex of high rises, life was easy. After graduating from McKinley High School, I went to Stanford University, departing in 1962 with a degree in chemical engineering, to work for C. Brewer as a sugar trainee at the Hutchinson Sugar Company.   I made this "sacrifice" because most of my close friends chose to join the first year of the Peace Corps.  They went off to places in Africa and the South Pacif...

Today I will write about life at Stanford University.  Much of this info comes from the monthly STANFORD for alumni, but I've also visited a bunch of times after graduating. One of the miracles of my life was that I even went there at all.  I was an average student most of my life.  Perhaps growing up in Kakaako, a lower-class portion of Honolulu, was partly responsible.  Maybe wanting to be like one of my gang was not personally productive.  Whatever, by the time I was a sophomore at McKinley High School, I was put in a lower level English-Social Studies group, as our school system placed students by performed capability. Around that time, Bishop Estate essentially kicked our neighborhood out of our homes to pave the way for all those tall buildings you now see in Ward Village.  Kalihi was not much of an improvement, plus I had to catch the bus to get to McKinley High School.  In most ways, I was sort of alone for the first time in my life.  Yes,...